This may sound a bit ridiculous to some people, SillyDog701 will ban the usage of any links (including the urls of the images) using Tiny URL or Snip URL (or any similar) services.

There's nothing wrong with such service, and there are merits for those services. However, SillyDog701 members' security and privacy are our first concerns. We believe prevention is better than sorry, hence there will be inconvenience.

So what do Tiny URL , Snip URL, ... etc do?
They can convert a lengthy link (URL) into a very tiny one.
What's wrong with this? people can hide anything by using such service. In other words, it can be abused easily.
In plain language, unknown website address or un-trusted website links can be well hidden in such service, the mouse over or status bar won't reveal actual location Users will need to click in order to know the actual link.

This won't affect most users, but if you were thinking about hiding the links, don't do it. Do NOT shorten URLs in such manner.

Again, members' security and privacy are our first concerns. We hope you can understand the inconvenience.

If you want to provide a link to website that has a very long URL, these services provide
a means to re-direct to the site via a much shorter URL. Here's a typical example of this:

If I had a website at GeoCities, with a long URL based on the old URL allocation system
they used before GeoCities was bought by Yahoo, such as the original version of my
currentwebsite DJGM On-line, which actually was on the original GeoCities.

Obviously, I no longer have a website at that URL anymore. But If I still did, and I
wanted to provide a link to it in this forum, or anywhere else, I could use services
from the likes of tinyurl.com and snurl.com.

These would give a much shorter URL that I can use to hide the full (long) URL,
and just give people the shorter URL which would redirect users to the original,
longer URL. The problem with this, is that mailicious users to set up a short URL
to disguise the fact that they're actually linking to an untrustworthy website,
that might feature inappropriateiate and/or illegal content, or one that may
invisibly download and/or install malicious code (spyware or virus) without
the end user's prior knowledge or consent. Although these short URL's are
useful, and have legitimate uses, they are a potential security risk, so
therefore, Antony has taken the decision to ban their use here.

Due to recent [sdt=8871]cybersquatted issues[/sdt], links posted to those three domains (sillydog.info, sillydog.us and sillydog701.org) known to be cybersquatted by UFAQ.org will not be clickable.

As a good gesture from SillyDog701, all links to UFAQ.org will continue to be clickable. SillyDog701 does not censor "UFAQ.org" or transposition "UFAQ.org" with anything else.

For more detail about the story, please see [sdt=8871]UFAQ.org cybersquats SillyDog701[/sdt].

We apologise the inconvenience caused by those three (3) cybersquatted domains. However, it is my responsibility to protect SillyDog701's identity and to inform all SillyDog701 users, SillyDog701's correct URL is http://sillydog.org/

Yeah I know about the dates of the last posts etc, but these days, at least with TinyURL, they offer a preview function (click, for example preview.tinyurl.com/blahblahblah) it can tell you what its linking to before you actually visit the site...